163 posts categorized "High Five"

September 03, 2008

1 The FBI arrests a blogger for putting
leaked songs from Guns N' Roses' very-long-awaited "Chinese Democracy"
LP on his blog. The hard part wasn't getting the songs; it was
transferring them to MP3 format from the wax cylinders they were
recorded on.

2 A new Web site,
HowManyofMe.com, tells you the number of people in the United States
who share your name. You can feel pretty insignificant as one of 9,659
Steven Johnsons, for instance, until you discover that there are more
than five times as many John Smiths.

3 In
setting up its new Chicago site, rich lady Arianna Huffington's
Huffington Post recruited local bloggers with the promise of paying
them exactly $0 for their contributions. Huffington Post Chicago: Your
home for discount opinions.

4 Showing
more of the customer-service magic it's known for, Comcast will cut
Internet users off at 250 gigabytes of data per month. Confidential to
peeved Comcast customers: AT&T's broadband DSL service is much
cheaper and still without limits.

5 Sports
columnist and 1980s hair wearer Jay Mariotti abruptly quits the
Sun-Times, saying the Internet is the future of journalism. His
confidence in this idea is shaken, however, after he talks to the
Huffington Post Chicago people about writing for them.

August 27, 2008

1. Internet users ages 10 to 14 find the Web more attractive than TV, according to a study. It's not that the Net is so enticing; it's just that by the time you hit 10, you've seen every "SpongeBob" episode an average of 23 times.

2. Guest blogging on the new Huffington Post Chicago site, Evanston native John Cusack misspells the names of Chris "Chellios" and Michael "Jordon," among other egregious errors (captured here before being corrected) that prompt one site to call Cusack's the "Worst Celebrity Blog Post Ever." But the actor mustered a rousing Chicago sports comeback: When he sang during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field over the weekend, he knew exactly how many strikes till you're out.

(At left, Lloyd Dobler plays some Peater Gabrielle.)

3. Microsoft hires Jerry Seinfeld to help push its much-maligned Vista product. It makes sense: Underperforming operating system robbed of incentive for excellence by years of monopoly dominance hires infrequently performing comedian robbed of incentive for humor by years of sitcom dominance.

4. The Los Angeles Times Web site mistakenly publishes, briefly, a story outlining Barack Obama's choice of Hillary Clinton as his running mate. Welcome to the Tribune family, L.A. Times! Your "Dewey defeats Truman" T-shirt is on its way.

5. Web users embrace the availability of thousands of hours of Olympics footage on NBC's Web site, but if you want to see the Opening Ceremony again, you have to buy an NBC DVD. Or just wait till Blue Man Group develops some real ambition.

August 05, 2008

1 Enjoying popularity online: Sites such as "The 100 Thing Challenge" which urge you to pare your overstuffed life down to the necessities. I'll start by trying to get down to 100 things in my wallet.

2 The Pitt-Jolie twins have made their first public appearance -- on the Internet, of course, where an angelic choir mysteriously plays whenever you summon up their image. To help them understand the world they won't be able to stay completely isolated from, I point them to Baby's First Internet, a spot-on Web-culture satire in the form a toddler's book. 3 So there was a hot rumor online a couple of weeks ago that Daily Candy, the e-mail newsletter for female shoppers, was going to be sold to Comcast for $75 million, but it hasn't happened. It's hard to close a deal with a company that says it will be at the meeting room between 9 a.m. and noon but never shows up. [Update: They did, finally, close the deal, and for $50 million extra.]

4 Journalists arriving in China to cover the Olympics are discovering that, despite promises from the International Olympic Committee, Internet access is being restricted. Then again, the IOC, with its limits on what athletes can post about the Games, is hardly the paragon of freedom on the Net.

5 America Online is getting ready to spin off and sell its dial-up Web access unit as a separate business. Any buyer will be able to pay in 1997 dollars and is allowed to talk about the "information superhighway."

June 11, 2008

1 Apple announces its new iPhone, with a faster Internet connection, and just in time. I was beginning to worry that, after the "Sex and the City" movie, we'd have to go several weeks without something new to overhype.

2 T-Mobile is suing Starbucks for breach of contract, claiming the coffee hut isn't being fair in managing the transition to AT&T as its Wi-Fi provider. The suit also asks for just one decent pastry option.

June 05, 2008

1 John Tesh has a blog on Twitter, the
popular microblogging application that lets you publish small thoughts
rapid-fire. Next thing you know, they'll be telling us Duran Duran has
a MySpace page. Wait, it does?

2National
Geographic's Web site shows a photo of members of an allegedly
"uncontacted" Amazon tribe painted red and shooting arrows at a passing
airplane. Join their Facebook group, "Your Thunder Bird Scares Us Not."

3 The divorce suit filed by Bill Murray's wife is up at The Smoking Gun, and apparently he's not the cheeriest of souls. Isn't marrying Bill Murray and complaining about misanthropy a little like moving near Wrigley Field and complaining about public urination?

4 To
raise money for charity, Bill Cosby and eBay are auctioning off the
comedian's old (and very loud) "Cosby Show" sweaters. Buy one and
imagine yourself courtside at a Jordan-era Bulls game, where the same
expensive, ugly garments were also much in evidence.

5 The
hit Irish blog "Garfield Minus Garfield" displays the strip with the
cat excised, revealing the existential, black-comic torment of
Garfield's owner, Jon. Inspired by this, I've discovered that a
newspaper comics page also gets a lot better when you remove "Garfield."

May 28, 2008

1 Microsoft is going to reward people who use its Live Search, the distant No. 3 search engine, by giving them shopping rebates. So we can all enjoy saving a few bucks before going back to Google.

2 Gov. Rod Blagojevich takes to CareerBuilder, advertising online for a new press secretary willing to deny that he is "Public Official A." Apply directly to Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn.

3 Most respondents to a question posed in MSNBC.com's "Netiquette" column said it is wrong for employees to spend work time on their Facebook or MySpace activities. They were answering this question, of course, during business hours.

4 Chicago sues eBay and StubHub, suggesting the sites are obligated to collect city tax on the event tickets that are sold there. So how long before, like New York State, Chicago tries to make Amazon collect sales tax?

5 A new blog with a great idea: Spamblr asks users to submit interpretations of the subject lines in spam they receive. "She knows well what really matters" gets matched with a woman thinking about rainbows and unicorns.

April 18, 2008

1. A new algorithm collects available Web-based information on a given topic and turns it into a book. It may not be perfect, though. The first title is rumored to be "Paris Hilton: City of Light."

2. The mom who let her 9-year-old take a New York subway home alone now has a blog, Free Range Kids, arguing for less parental hovering, more child independence. So parents, quick, set your Internet filters to block freerangekids.wordpress.com.

3. New term alert: "Supercuts," to describe the trend of repetitive, Web-posted montages culled from popular culture, such as every instance of David Caruso removing his sunglasses on "CSI: Miami" or every inhalation during an hour of NPR's "All Things Considered." The term can also be used to describe any series of bad $8 haircuts.

4. The creator of Rocketboom is auctioning his Twitter account on eBay. You could feel bad about not knowing what most of that means, or you could congratulate yourself on having a life in the 3-D world.

5. One of the teen girls charged in a made-for-YouTube beating of another girl was bailed out of jail by a producer for the "Dr. Phil" show in a plan to secure her as a guest. Trolling detention facilities for the sake of ratings, Phil — how's that working out for ya?

March 19, 2008

1. Google unveils Google Sky, its celestial partner to Google Earth. There goes your last excuse for being late to the party at Orion's Belt.

2. Singer Jill Sobule ("I Kissed a Girl") used her Web site to collect $80,000 from fans to pay for a new album. This financing model gets my endorsement only if you can also pay people not to make new records. Is it "celinedion.com"?

3. Once ballyhooed, now troubled, startup online music service SpiralFrog.com has been given an extra year to pay back $7 million in loans, C/Net News reports. One problem: The name doesn't bring to mind MP3s so much as Dan Aykroyd with a blender.

4. After using his radio show to appeal directly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs for tech support, longtime "Mac
guy" Rush Limbaugh got a company engineer assigned to him, he said, and his e-mails are now archiving properly. This takes "AppleCare" — the company's name for its extended warranty program — to a new level.

March 18, 2008

1. You know those cool, new $1,800 MacBook Airs, billed as the world's thinnest laptops? Newsweek technology columnist Steven Levy lost his recently, and he figured out his wife must have scooped it up and put it out in the recycling bin with a pile of newspapers. Strangely, he later discovered his copy of "Halo 3," back catalog of PC World magazines and TiVo remote were also missing.

2. Internal Microsoft e-mails, made public in a lawsuit, reveal a number of senior executives sharing the general public's displeasure with the company's vaunted new Vista operating system. On the other hand, they still love their chocolate-brown Zunes.

3. People who don't like what the General Motors Hummer represents -- even the smaller H2 model -- have been sharing their displeasure at the FUH2 site (fuh2.com), a collection of pictures of people extending a middle digit in the direction of the vehicles. It's funny until the car notices.

4. Chicago Web developer Aza Raskin (Humanized, Songza) is now selling Bloxes, sturdy cardboard bricks he developed that can be used to build office furniture, room dividers and just about anything else not involving water. Operating theory: Why shouldn't adults be allowed to play with Legos?

5. A new Facebook application, VooZoo, lets users send each other clips from Paramount movies (followed, of course, by a link to let you buy the DVD). Can't wait to try it. What's the name of that Paramount movie about the people who have way too much time on their hands?

March 05, 2008

1. Virginia's Supreme Court upholds the country's first felony conviction for a spammer. Also, he must send apologetic e-mails to everybody he bothered.

2. When The New York Times removed the paid barriers from its Web site, it doubled the amount of traffic it received from Google, a Google engineer asserts. And in that sentence, the only one who can look forward to making a decent salary is the Google engineer.

3. At a conference, Web 2.0 proponents foresee the death of e-mail. You know, just like television proponents foresaw the death of radio.

4. Notoriously controlling Wal-Mart now lets its buyers speak freely in a blog, checkoutblog.com. As for the
customers, you can leave comments there, but don't expect to be treated differently from any other supplier. Unless you provide three, or even four comments at a time -- and better packaging -- Wal-Mart may decide to source its comments elsewhere.

5. Relentlessly juvenile celebrity blogging superstar Perez Hilton made the gossip columns for allegedly soliciting erotic videos from an aspiring blogger who wanted his help. The word to scrawl across Hilton's photo, in classic Perez Hilton style, is "comeuppance."